I generally agree with you, but Russia can’t even manufacture weapons up to par with SU in 1980s.
What Russia can't do is afford any of this. Forget the sanctions, their economy is small, and not willing to under go the hardships of the communist era. So they've been forced to use older gear, and their newer gear has been crushed in combat.
And don't forget that most militaries have old gear. B-52, B-1, B-2, etc are old old airframes. M1 is an old tank design (though it has been upgraded heavily). Bradleys are an old ICV design, again upgraded heavily. But the US still uses M113 from the 70s in some units, the Blackhawk and Apache are from the 80s, and we have ships in the USN that are almost old enough to qualify as senior citizens.
And then when you combine the impact of sanctions, it becomes much more challenging. Most of their precision machinery is imported from Europe, and as spare parts start to be consumed, this will impact their production rates as well.
You can either bring a weapon to a fight or not.
Look at all the failed, truncated, or outright cancelled US military programs over the last 30 years. Crusader. Comanche. A-12. Seawolf. DDG-1000. B-2. F-22. EFV. GCV. These were all either shortsightedly gutted or cancelled when they didn't progress enough in development.
Developing military gear is very hard, even when you have the world's largest military budget. Now imagine doing it with 5% of that GDP. That's how small Russia's economy is compared to the US.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that Russia can't develop good weapon systems because their leader is a snot sucking wanna-be imperialist. They just can't develop AND produce them in the scale that they used to. Funds matter...
I agree with everything else you've said however.
Pretty much what I said in my reply.
Do you know what A-10s have done for the majority of their missions in the last decade? Flown high with JDAMS and loitered, waiting for a call. The gun is all sexy, but just not used enough. And the A-10 would be crushed over a battlefield like Ukraine. Hell, even the B-1 was used for CAS missions in Afghan because it could get their fast, and had better loiter time than most other aircraft. Of course the wisdom of using $300M+ bombers in this manner is questionable.
My point wasn't that old is bad, but that all militaries use old gear. The new gear is often enhancements to old gear.
The F-35 likely exceeds the Warthog in other aspects, however.